[41 Brimmer St., Boston]
Not very much time this morning, but more than I expected, as Faber is at home with a cold and therefore a special meeting to discuss a series of books is postponed. I go to lunch at the Lauriers in Jermyn Street with young MacSweeney [sic]1 of the Colonial Office – one of the few other ligeurs [sc. ligueurs] de l’Action Francaise in England – andShakespeare Association Councilmeeting of;a1 thence to a Shakespeare Association meeting.
I did not last Tuesday tell you that I liked your new letter-paper lettering. Andappearance (TSE's)teeth;c2;a1 I am vexed that I did not ask you for more particular information about your teeth, because I should like to know at once. ‘Infection’ sounds alarming. Will you please remember when you mention such things to give more information at the time – otherwise I shall worry about it for a month! I have had tooth poisoning myself – in 1925 had to have a long operation under ether and months of injections for the toxaemia (my teeth now answer the rollcall only to the number of 26 out of the total 32) and the poisoning is held responsible for a cloudy spot in my right eye which gets no worse and will get no better, my oculist tells me: so you see I am justified in worrying about yours. And was it very expensive? I hope your teeth are better than mine, which are nothing but chalk.
ICoward, NoëlHay Fever;a7 havereading (TSE's)Hay Fever;a2 read HayHale, Emilyas actor;v8as Judith Bliss in Hay Fever;a4 Fever twice, and have thought of it every evening – you come on somewhere between one and two a.m. of my clock, I suppose. It is a very trifling part for you, but I should like to have known what you can make of it. Of course the play is very cleverly constructed, and I imagine plays very fast – the travesty of parlour games is extremely clever and effective. ItHuxley, AldousThe World of Light;b9compared to Hay Fever;a3 is interesting to compare it with Aldous’s – it is obviously much better technique – but how much easier it is to write a play when one has no serious idea at all, and merely a quick superficial observation of social behaviour!
I worry also rather about your overworking. I am sure that it is much more fatiguing to work up a part – particularly when one puts so much into it as you do – only for a few performances, than for a professional production with some chance of a long run – each performance must cost you far more in energy; and even though you are playing during a year a very small number of days compared to what you would be, if you were a professional, yet you are spending, I fear, far more. I know that I disperse, myself, far more energy than I should in different circumstances, and I know why I am tempted to do so; and I feel deathly tired all the time. And when you were teaching, too, I am sure that you gave out more than you ought to, to your pupils.
SoJames, HenryTSE on;a1 youHale, Emilyreading;w8Henry James;a1 have a ‘set’ of Henry James; I am glad of that, for he has always meant a great deal to me; largely because of a kind of spiritual insight which he shares with Hawthorne – who is also a favourite of mine. IEnglandand Henry James;a3 think it took James a long time to understand the English; my theory is that no one can really get inside the skin of another country unless he has had to earn his living in it; James was always able to move comfortably, and without dangerously close contacts, among such very nice society, country houses and clubs and the highlySands, Ethelbores TSE;a1 cultivated Americans (who bore me) like Ethel Sands2 andSmith, Logan Pearsall;a1 the Pearsall Smiths;3 there was something well padded about his life. InEuropeand Henry James;a1 this way, I think Europe retained for a long time a queer glamour for him, though he had always great insight too – one of the strangest is his unfinished and posthumous ‘SenseJames, HenryThe Sense of the Past;b4;a1 of the Past’ (have you read that?) in which I think he is trying to realise that there exists in England a kind of beastly vulgarity which he had not grasped so consciously before – I may be wrong about all this. IJames, HenryTSE's personal James canon;a2 like particularly some of his middle period short stories (The Velvet Glove etc.) do you know ‘The Altar of the Dead’ or ‘The Friends of the Friends’?4 Onede Menasce, Jeanas Jamesian, as translator;a1 of the few people I ever knew who seemed to me to get this part of his work as I do (very few English can understand him fully) was my friend Jean de Menasce – he was a Jew from Alexandria – very sensitive – cosmopolitan – Balliol – polyglot – the best translator into French I ever had – his father was the head of the Ghetto in Alexandria and very important there, and when Jean was converted to Rome his father practically banished him from Alexandria and Jerusalem – and nowMaritain, Jacquesand de Menasce's conversion and ordination;a1, partly I think under the influence of our friend Maritain5 – Jean is a Dominican monk!6
This is a letter without beginning or end – an interim between two Mondays, my dear, the day of the week for which I pray – so
1.D. C. J. McSweeney.
2.EthelSands, Ethel Sands (1873–1962), wealthy and cultured American-born artist, patron and collector: at her London home, 15 The Vale, Chelsea, she courted many of the artists and writers of the age.
3.LoganSmith, Logan Pearsall Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), American-born writer, journalist, critic, anthologist. Educated at Haverford College, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, he settled in England in the 1880s (becoming a British subject in 1913), and proceeded to read Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford. Through his family circle he became known to a large number of artistic figures including G. B. Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Roger Fry, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Berenson. Works include Words and Idioms (1925), Unforgotten Years (1938). See further A Portrait of Logan Pearsall Smith, drawn from his letters and diaries, ed. J. Russell; A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith, ed. E. Tribble (1984).
4.‘The Velvet Glove’ (1909); ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895); ‘The Friends of the Friends’ (1896). TSEJames, HenryTSE on;a1 told Herbert Read on 18 Jan. 1927 that he considered Henry James ‘especially difficult because to me he seems not wholly conscious. There is something bigger there, of which he is hardly aware, than “civilisation” & its “complexities.” In some ways he seems to me, as a conscious person, a child: which is perhaps why I like some of his poorer stuff better than his best; in his poorer stuff something bigger appears without his knowing it – e.g. I like especially “The Altar of the Dead” & “The Friends of the Friends”.’ To Read, 20 Jan. 1927: ‘I speak with diffidence about James. I mean partly that he directed to the intensification of social values feeling which is properly religious, so that part of his work has to be interpreted & given a sense he would not [have] admitted himself. I feel that the Vita Nuova is more “conscious” than “The Friends of the Friends” or “The Altar of the Dead”’ (Letters 3, 378, 387). See further Lyndall Gordon, Hyacinth Girl, 170–1.
5.JacquesMaritain, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), philosopher and littérateur, was at first a disciple of Bergson, but revoked that allegiance (L’Evolutionnisme de M. Bergson, 1911; La Philosophie bergsonienne, 1914) and became a Roman Catholic and foremost exponent of Neo-Thomism. For a while in the 1920s he was associated with Action Française, but the connection ended in 1926. Works include Art et scolastique (1920); Saint Thomas d’Aquin apôtre des temps modernes (1923); Réflexions sur l’intelligence (1924); Trois Réformateurs (1925); Primauté du spirituel (1927), Humanisme intégral (1936), Scholasticism and Politics (1940), Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953). TSE told Ranjee Shahani (John O’London’s Weekly, 19 Aug. 1949, 497–8) that Maritain ‘filled an important role in our generation by uniting philosophy and theology, and also by enlarging the circle of readers who regard Christian philosophy seriously’. See Walter Raubicheck, ‘Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, and the Romantics’, Renascence 46:1 (Fall 1993), 71–9; Shun’ichi Takayanagi, ‘T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Neo-Thomism’, The Modern Schoolman 73: 1 (Nov. 1995), 71–90; Jason Harding, ‘“The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher”: Jacques Maritain and T. S. Eliot’, in The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, ed. J. Heynickx and J. De Maeyer (Leuven, 2010), 180–91; James Matthew Wilson, ‘“I bought and praised but did not read Aquinas”: T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and the Ontology of the Sign’, Yeats Eliot Review 27: 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2010), 21; and Carter Wood, This Is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–40 (Manchester, 2019), 69–72.
6.Jeande Menasce, Jean de Menasce (1902–73), theologian and orientalist (his writings include studies in Judaism, Zionism and Hasidism), was born in Alexandria into an aristocratic Egyptian Jewish family and educated in Alexandria, at Balliol College, Oxford (he was contemporary with Graham Greene and took his BA in 1924), and at the Sorbonne (Licence de Lettres). In Paris, he was associated with the magazines Commerce and L’Esprit, and he translated several of TSE’s poems for French publication: his translation of The Waste Land was marked ‘revué et approuvée par l’auteur’. He became a Catholic convert in 1926, was ordained in 1935 a Dominican priest – Father Pierre de Menasce – and became Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Fribourg, 1938–48; Professor and Director of Studies, specialising in Ancient Iranian Religions, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (1949–70).
6.Jeande Menasce, Jean de Menasce (1902–73), theologian and orientalist (his writings include studies in Judaism, Zionism and Hasidism), was born in Alexandria into an aristocratic Egyptian Jewish family and educated in Alexandria, at Balliol College, Oxford (he was contemporary with Graham Greene and took his BA in 1924), and at the Sorbonne (Licence de Lettres). In Paris, he was associated with the magazines Commerce and L’Esprit, and he translated several of TSE’s poems for French publication: his translation of The Waste Land was marked ‘revué et approuvée par l’auteur’. He became a Catholic convert in 1926, was ordained in 1935 a Dominican priest – Father Pierre de Menasce – and became Professor of the History of Religion at the University of Fribourg, 1938–48; Professor and Director of Studies, specialising in Ancient Iranian Religions, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (1949–70).
10.AldousHuxley, Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), novelist, poet, essayist: see Biographical Register.
5.JacquesMaritain, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), philosopher and littérateur, was at first a disciple of Bergson, but revoked that allegiance (L’Evolutionnisme de M. Bergson, 1911; La Philosophie bergsonienne, 1914) and became a Roman Catholic and foremost exponent of Neo-Thomism. For a while in the 1920s he was associated with Action Française, but the connection ended in 1926. Works include Art et scolastique (1920); Saint Thomas d’Aquin apôtre des temps modernes (1923); Réflexions sur l’intelligence (1924); Trois Réformateurs (1925); Primauté du spirituel (1927), Humanisme intégral (1936), Scholasticism and Politics (1940), Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953). TSE told Ranjee Shahani (John O’London’s Weekly, 19 Aug. 1949, 497–8) that Maritain ‘filled an important role in our generation by uniting philosophy and theology, and also by enlarging the circle of readers who regard Christian philosophy seriously’. See Walter Raubicheck, ‘Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, and the Romantics’, Renascence 46:1 (Fall 1993), 71–9; Shun’ichi Takayanagi, ‘T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and Neo-Thomism’, The Modern Schoolman 73: 1 (Nov. 1995), 71–90; Jason Harding, ‘“The Just Impartiality of a Christian Philosopher”: Jacques Maritain and T. S. Eliot’, in The Maritain Factor: Taking Religion into Interwar Modernism, ed. J. Heynickx and J. De Maeyer (Leuven, 2010), 180–91; James Matthew Wilson, ‘“I bought and praised but did not read Aquinas”: T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, and the Ontology of the Sign’, Yeats Eliot Review 27: 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2010), 21; and Carter Wood, This Is Your Hour: Christian Intellectuals in Britain and the Crisis of Europe, 1937–40 (Manchester, 2019), 69–72.
2.EthelSands, Ethel Sands (1873–1962), wealthy and cultured American-born artist, patron and collector: at her London home, 15 The Vale, Chelsea, she courted many of the artists and writers of the age.
3.LoganSmith, Logan Pearsall Pearsall Smith (1865–1946), American-born writer, journalist, critic, anthologist. Educated at Haverford College, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, he settled in England in the 1880s (becoming a British subject in 1913), and proceeded to read Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford. Through his family circle he became known to a large number of artistic figures including G. B. Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Roger Fry, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Berenson. Works include Words and Idioms (1925), Unforgotten Years (1938). See further A Portrait of Logan Pearsall Smith, drawn from his letters and diaries, ed. J. Russell; A Chime of Words: The Letters of Logan Pearsall Smith, ed. E. Tribble (1984).